Monthly Archives: July 2017

My music-loving friend who upgraded his Bricasti M1 to the gold-plated edition wanted to be able to continue to listen to Long-Playing vinyl phonograph records. However, while Bricasti’s M12 Source Controller does have a set of analog inputs, the M1 does not.

I suppose I should now insert a Heresy Trigger Warning Alert, in that I believe that in most cases, LPs are not really a high-resolution format–compared to anything as good as or better than native 20-bit 44.1kHz PCM. So I chose the expedient but gratifyingly effective path of specifying an affordable Analog to Digital Converter that I surmise was made for the Custom Installation market, the now-discontinued Key Digital AXXDA, for the princely sum of $50. That unit is based on a 24-bit, 48kHz chip.

Click on the jump link to hear the surprisingly good results from a MoFi vintage Frank Sinatra 180-gram remastering! Continue Reading →

John Coltrane would leave for a road trip with the Quartet carrying nothing but his horn case and the Slonimsky book.—McCoy Tyner

John Coltrane (1926-1967) is generally recognized as one of the most significant saxophonists in music history. However, at times I wonder whether the famous phrase applied to his playing—”Sheets of sound”—actually might lead the unwary to underestimate his talent, work ethic, and achievements. Such is the problem with music-history courses graded via multiple-choice examinations. “Coltrane???” “Oh, yeah—Sheets of sound!” A bit reductive… .

In truth, Coltrane was quite a Music Theory Nerd. He owned a copy of Nicholas Slonimsky’s fearsome Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, and had memorized much of it. (That book, first published in 1947, includes more than a thousand musical examples, the majority being not in traditional Western major or minor scales.)

The title track of Coltrane’s LP Giant Steps (recorded 1959) moves through three keys separated by major thirds… hence the giant steps. The tight structuring of this brief musical gem should dispel the impression that Coltrane was just making random noises. The animated graphical representation by Michal Levy is in its own way a great work of art, too.